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“I thought I told you never to call this number again,” Paris slurred.
There was silence on the other end. Since it was Rory’s silence, it told her many things. Too bad she was far too gone to register any of those things.
“Or maybe I, maybe I didn’t tell you that, I might have been talking to the…” Paris said, and squinted up at the bartender, “Swedish? Person?”
“Finnish,” he said, and quietly took Paris’ fifth whisky away from her.
Paris slowly grogged the deep, primal loss of her drink. She heard a dim yelling, like a gnat doing karaoke in the other room, and realised Rory had started yelling at her on the line. Paris might be in trouble. She swallowed and brought the phone up again.
“He-they’re Finnish,” she said. The bartender smiled, and slid her some peanuts for her allyship.
“He/him,” the bartender said as Rory asked her what the fuck she was talking about. She was angry this time, and that was fair. It had been some time, hadn’t it. It had been a while. Paris put her on speaker, so she could eat peanuts.
“He’s Finnish,” Paris repeated sadly, putting her head in her hands. She wanted the room to stop spinning. She wanted Rory to stop yelling. She wanted to wake up again at the start of the day.
“Shut up, you’re finished,” Rory said, her voice breaking painfully. She might have been crying. Paris didn’t have it in her to make another detailed study plan that Rory wouldn’t read to calm her down. Even if Paris snuck in lesbian sex orgies and crashing congressional sessions by streaking across the legislative floor, Rory wouldn’t ever bother to read it.
“You’re on speaker,” Paris said, plucking another peanut, “The whole bar thinks you’re pathetic. I don’t.”
“Where are you? Hey, where is she?”
“Below Bottom,” the bartender said. “I didn’t pick the name,” he added.
“You picked the drink names,” Paris accused, “I had two Vinyl Tumbles and a Leather Belter. That was all you, Meeek-ko.”
“And also the whisky,” Mikko the bartender said.
“And also the whisky!”
Rory snorted. “Well, apparently the whole bar thinks I’m pathetic, but you’re having fun so at least that’s nice.”
“Everyone thinks you’re pathetic. All our friends. Thirty something homewrecker burnout. They get to have it easy. They can just forget about you. I don’t, I don’t get to have that.”
There was silence at the other end. Mikko was shaking his head and sighing. She caught someone murmur an Ouch down the bar.
“...God, you’re gonna regret this later, you know that?” Rory said, “You’re gonna buy me so many nice fucking things, you’re gonna damn well buy me the boat that went up the river.”
“Not the stupidest thing I ever did for you,” Paris said. Mikko rolled his eyes. Yeah, not her best line, peanut aisle. She handed him a walnut.
“No, not by a long shot. It’s kinda hard to beat drunk-calling me six times after three months of radio silence, asking me if I wanted to fence again sometime! And then not picking up, I called you thirty times, what the f-”
“You know, when we got your file at school, Thelma and Louise, they didn’t want to sneak through the bushes for it, didn’t want to get down in the mud, but I just…I had to.”
Paris blinked. She swallowed. Before Rory could say anything, she leaned forward.
“How’s…how’s Lo?”
She refused to call Lorelai the third, or Rory the second, anything but Lo.
Rory sighed. “She’s fine, she misses you.”
“No, she doesn’t.”
A snort building into a huff of laugh came over the line. Damn straight, Paris thought to herself.
“No,” Rory said, “She doesn't.”
“She can’t tell us apart, Rory,” Paris said, “Lo doesn’t know I’m not there. She’s one and a half.”
“She’s with a sitter tonight,” Rory said, tired of Paris’ line of charades, the little land mines she left behind her, “And she just turned two, it was her birthday two days ago, and you know that.”
It was a Friday night. When Rory and Rory the second/third/Lo were supposed to come over, except they’d never done that, so that wasn’t something Paris got to cry about or accuse Rory for. Usually Paris just came over to theirs. It wasn’t something she got to put on the table, when she had never come and sat at the table herself. She’d never put her own flesh on the agenda. Not when it came to Rory, who’d always had a taste for Paris, but only just a taste.
“I saw the party photos on instagram, is Dean still in your DMs?”
“I don’t know, are you still watching all my stories on your private alt?”
Paris huffs.
“We decided years ago to never mention each other’s alts, you know that.”
“We also decided we wouldn’t fucking ghost each other!”
“I don’t remember saying that?”
“It was when we got drunk after you ran into my dorm crying that you killed your aging law professor by having an illicit affair with him,” Rory simpered.
Paris barked, and grabbed a handful of peanuts. Mikko seemed quite impressed, and that warmed her.
There was a smug silence over the line. Paris’ mouth was running before she could stop herself.
“All affairs are illicit, Gilmore, shouldn’t-”
Paris cut herself off. Her head was back in her hands. Rory’s call went quiet. Okay, wow, someone murmured and stood up from the bar and walked off. Mikko was shaking his head again.
“What, is that,” Rory said, her voice shaking, “That cause I’m a homewrecker? Take that left, please.”
Paris sighed. Fuck this. Fuck pretending they didn’t sometimes resort to cutting each other up because they could never reach for any other type of foreplay, all that boring shit.
“I’m the guy who calls you out on your shit, Rory.”
“You used to be nicer about it. Actually no, you were less cruel about it…”
Paris wet her lips.
“You just go around being all righteous. Sometimes you’re good, but not always. You sell your not being good so well. It makes people think they have to be better. You’re not even smug, you’re just genuinely arrogant and ir? Un? Not,” Paris said, “Not self aware enough to know you’re doing it. I don’t know why I like it so much.”
Rory chuckled wetly over the phone. “Yeah, that’s true.”
Paris smiled softly. The bar faded away, and all she heard for a moment was Rory over the phone.
“I’m sorry,” Paris said. Her fingers shook, like they always did when she’d said something stupid and hurtful again and Rory was just saying nothing, letting her wait and stew. In those few seconds of silence, Paris was always so remorseful, but she’d still never managed to catch the moment she should have realised she should shut up. Still didn’t.
Rory said nothing. Well, she’d never minded Paris her little moments of shittiness. No, she’d never minded at all.
“I’ll be there in a bit,” she said, and then the dial tone was ringing out across the bar.
Paris put the phone down. Huh. Thirty missed calls from Rory Gilmore. She was never letting Rory live that down.
“I’m younger than her, you know. She’s thirty. I’m twenty-nine. You can do this kind of stuff in your twenties.”
“I have your ID, Paris,” Mikko gently reminded.
Paris nodded.
“So you do,” she said.
“She’s your emergency contact on all your cards,” Mikko said, wiping it down, in a very nonchalant bartender tone and a very nonchalant wiping motion.
Paris snorted and dipped her head.
“Doesn’t it just get boring, after a while. Helping people figure out that they’re in love with their best friend from when they were kids and that nothing makes it stop, not even three months of pretending you didn’t draw up a twenty year education plan for her kid’s second birthday. You know, one time I broke my wrist and I didn’t let them call her number on my card. She would have taken me home…”
He said nothing, even as her tone grew thorns and frosted over.
“What’re you gonna tell your grandkids when you retire?” she muttered.
Mikko quietly cleaned up the powdered mess of peanuts she hadn’t realised she’d made.
“I’m sorry,” Paris said, because you could only be so much of a bitch, and then, because apparently not, “I’m gonna tell them her first drafts were always shit, and I always had to be the one to fix them. I had to.”
“I have your wallet,” Mikko said, “You’re a very generous tipper.”
Paris nodded. “People like me have to be,” she said. She stared at his hands, gently cleaning up her mess, even as she rambled and ruined anything redeemable about her night’s excess with all the ugly parts of being too old to be young and lost and perfectly aware of what she wanted. She swallowed, and shut her mouth, and pressed her hand into her thighs, trying to ground herself in the misery she’d been walking around in for months.
But it was lifting away. She took a deep breath.
“I want her to tell me it's my turn to change Lo’s diapers,” Paris said.
But Mikko was gone, tending to another customer further down the bar.
Paris sighed, and turned in her barstool. Her legs couldn’t quite reach the bottom. She hooked a foot around the pole, and slowly swung back and forth on the barstool.
Somewhere someplace, Rory Gilmore was having to be the normal, functioning one between the two of them. Well, good. So there, Gilmore. So there.